Beginner’s Guide for Hay Day

When it comes to farming sims, you can’t get much more classic than with Hay Day. This game takes the fun and innovative formula of the first farming sims such as Zynga’s Farmville, and adds its own unique touch to create a brand new mobile game. The resulting creation is as colorful as its predecessors and will be very familiar to the veterans of the genre. However, Hay Day still manages to include several elements that will take even the most seasoned players by surprise.

In this sense, we wanted to create a guide where we explain all the terms and most of the mechanics that you’ll need to get familiarized with in order to start your farm on the right foot.

Starting Equipment

Right off the bat, you will find that your farm is fairly weathered, and could use some sprucing up before you take charge. In the tutorial, you’ll get to apply a coat of paint to your farmhouse, your barn, and your silo, after which you will gain total controls of sowing, harvesting, constructing, and all other activities concerning your farm.

As soon as you recondition your 3 starting buildings, you will be able to make use of them. Each of these buildings has an important function to fulfill, and your future success will depend, in part, on being able to upgrade them at a steady pace. The buildings you begin with are the following:

Silo: The cylindrical building behind your house. This structure contains all the vegetables, berries, and fruits you harvest in your farm. In the beginning, it will fill up very quickly so you’ll need to sell produce at your roadside shop regularly, as well as use your raw materials to create other goods such as bread, butter, cream, and so on. Your silo will only be able big enough to store 50 units at first, and each upgrade will increase its capacity by 25 points. In order to upgrade the silo, you will need nails, screws, and wooden panels. The number of items required will increase as your silo reaches higher levels.

Barn: The big red building beside your farmhouse. This structure houses a wide variety of goods that are produced in your farm, as well as the other items that you can find as you play, including explosives, tools, supplies, and upgrade materials. The barn is also very important, as it will contain most of the supplies that you use in order to advance your farm. If your barn ever becomes full, you will stop receiving rare drops, as well as the supplies that randomly drop from tending to your farm every once in a while. It is very important that you always keep your barn tidy, as you won’t get a notification if it’s full whenever you get a random rare drop. Instead, it’ll only notify you when you’re trying to collect some goods, and there’s no more space. Like the silo, the barn starts with a capacity of 50 units, and each upgrade increases its capacity by 25 points. In order to upgrade this building, you’ll need planks, duct tape, and bolts.

Farmhouse: Even though it looks like the hub of your activities, this is actually the least important building. The farmhouse is useful for keeping track of your achievements. By clicking on this building, you will get a list of milestones that award XP and diamonds upon completion. It’s useful for this purpose, yet utterly useless for everything else.

Currencies

In Hay Day, you will strive to amass several types of currency, as these are, among other things, a good indicator of your progress in the game. Coins, at least, are very important in the beginning, as they will allow you to purchase items that will help you to upgrade your barn and silo. However, as you progress in the game, and your farm begins to take shape, you’ll notice that coins are very easy to come by. Furthermore, as soon as you’ve unlocked all the upgrades for your buildings, this currency loses a bit of value, as you won’t have anything on which to invest them. Nevertheless, the point where coins lose all value is way off from the beginning, and you’ll need to gather as much of this currency as you can in order to move things along.

The only other currency in this game is diamonds, the premium currency, which can be purchased using real money. Unlike many online games, the premium currency doesn’t give any unfair advantages to the players (not that there’s such a thing in a game where there is no player-versus-player mode such as this one), they are used mostly to speed some construction projects, as well as to purchase missing materials when you’re looking to produce goods, or when you want to upgrade a building. Furthermore, diamonds are also used to purchase fun and quirky decorations to make your farmstead stand out from the rest.

Tools

As soon as you begin your game, you will notice that you only have a small lot of land on which to construct your buildings and sow your seeds and that the rest of your land is covered by a thicket of trees, shrubs, swamps, and rocks. You can only clear these obstructions with the tools that you pick up during play.

Speaking of which, there are 5 types of tools available in Hay Day:

Axe: Used for cutting down small saplings.

Dynamite: Used for clearing small rocks.

TNT: Used for blowing away big boulders.

Shovel: Used when covering swamps.

Saw: Used for removing big trees.

Besides receiving them as rare drops, you can also find these tools in other players’ farms for sale in their roadside shop. However, these are likely to be too expensive for you at this point. Luckily, there’s always more than enough space for you to construct the foundations of what will surely be an amazing farm.

The Formula To Succeed at Hay Day

Since there is little to no competition in Hay Day, most players can take their time, and devise their own strategies to succeed at the game. However, there is a series of steps that you can follow every time you log into the game, to make sure that you’re covering most of the bases in order to run your farm in an efficient manner:

Harvest and plant new crops. Plant the slowest crops if you won’t be logging in again for a few hours.

Collect animal products and feed your farm animals. Make sure to have enough food on hand to feed your animals the next time you log in.

Set your production machines to produce goods. Make them produce the slowest goods if you’re going to log off for an extended period of time.

Check the newspaper for deals, and purchase items that you might need to upgrade your farm.

Sell your goods in your roadside shop. Make sure to advertise the item with the highest quality to grab the attention of potential buyers.

By following these steps every time you log into the game, you will be able to advance at a steady pace in Hay Day. Before long, you’ll have barns and silos large enough to allow you to engage in advanced strategies, such as “wheating,” through which you will scavenge for rare drops and supplies. Read more about “Wheating” in this guide here. Furthermore, you’ll steadily make enough money to fund all your endeavors.

Getting the hang of this game is simply a matter of perseverance and covering all the important areas of your farm.